Jewish Humanists Remembered: Joseph Zuken (1912-1986)
In this series we are featuring profiles of leading
secular and humanistic
Jews from various countries and eras. These profiles are written by Bennett
Muraskin, a regular contributor to Outlook, Humanistic Judaism and Jewish
Currents.
Joe Zuken was a life-long secular Jew who successfully integrated
his
Jewish identity with his commitment to socialism and democracy. His
forty-two years of public service to the people of Winnipeg as a communist
legislator earned him the respect of Canadians of many political
persuasions, and the love and admiration of the Jewish working class from
which he sprang.
Zuken came to Winnipeg from the Ukraine as an infant and
was raised in a
working-class neighbourhood in the city's North End, a bastion of Jewish
labour radicalism. His parents were socialists and sent him to the Winnipeg
I.L. Peretz Shule, a secular Yiddish school. In 1925, he was part of its
first graduating class. Chaim Zhitlovsky, the world-renowned advocate
for
secular Yiddish education, was the guest speaker at his graduation. Later
Zuken taught Yiddish, Jewish history and literature at the I.L Peretz
Schule as well as a more radical Yiddish school, the Sholem Aleichem Shule.
Although Zucken was too young to experience the great Winnipeg
General
Strike of 1919, he identified with its message of working-class solidarity.
In this spirit, he became an attorney, providing legal representation
to
the poor and disenfranchised. He joined the Communist Party of Canada
and
participated in its many struggles for workers' rights and against fascism
and antisemitism. When the Party was made illegal, from 1940 to 1942,
he
defended its leadership in numerous legal battles that established
important precedents for civil liberties. He represented a number of
left-wing unions, and in the late sixties he helped establish a legal
clinic to assist poor women in obtaining divorces.
From 1941 to 1961, Zuken was a member of the Winnipeg school
board. It was one thing to be elected in the 1940s, when the Soviet Union
was allied with Canada in World War Two, but it was quite another to win
reelection during the Cold War, when the Communist Party was vilified
by virtually all
politicians and media. However, Zuken prevailed because of his integrity
and service to his constituents. His major accomplishments were the
establishment of kindergartens in the public schools, the provision of
free
textbooks, the abolition of examination fees, and higher teachers'
salaries.
From 1961 until his retirement from politics in 1983, he
served as a city
councilman from the North End, fighting for open government, low-rent
public housing, fair taxation of commercial property, for public defenders
of the indigent, and for public hospitals. The conservative elements that
dominated the Council blocked his proposed legislation and excluded him
from standing committees, but Zuken never gave up. After years of
perseverance, many of his initiatives were adopted.
Zuken ran for mayor in 1979 as a communist, campaigning
for the kind of
urban renewal and planning that would benefit the people rather than the
real estate interests. His chief opponent played the anti-communist card,
claiming that if Zuken were elected, banks would deny the city credit
and
its economy would be ruined. Zuken received only 20% of the vote,
but was
easily reelected to his Council seat.
By the 1970s, Zuken had overcome years of red-baiting and
become a popular figure with the media and the public at large. Most of
all, his
constituents knew that he placed their interests first and could be counted
on to provide honest and effective representation. After he announced
his
retirement from politics in 1983, due to health problems, the University
of
Winnipeg, the University of Manitoba and the City Council itself honoured
him.
Zuken remained a member of the Canadian Communist Party
from the Stalin to the Brezhnev era, notwithstanding its loyal support
for the Soviet Union
and the Soviet-dominated governments of Eastern Europe. Although he had
private reservations about many Soviet policies, he did not begin to
express them until 1967, when he took exception to the Soviet Union's
support for the Arab side in the Six Day War. Thereafter, he publicly
criticized the Soviet Union's restrictions on Jewish immigration and the
antisemitic campaign in Poland that drove out the remaining Jewish
community in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Zuken spoke Yiddish fluently and loved Yiddish culture,
especially the
writings of I.L. Peretz. He was a founding member of the United Jewish
People's Order (UJPO), the mutual aid and cultural organization for
left-wing Canadian Jews, and wrote for and served on the advisory board
of
Canadian Jewish Outlook, a socialist-humanist Jewish magazine closely
associated with UJPO. Two of his contributions appear in The Canadian
Jewish Outlook Anthology. He firmly believed in the value of Jewish
secularism based on "the richness of Jewish literature and culture, the
humanism of the classical writers and their teachings of respect for the
Jewish people." Toward the end of his life he gave a series of lectures
at
the Winnipeg UJPO on the great Yiddish writers.
For Zuken, being a Jew meant linking the struggles of the
Jewish people
with the global struggle for peace and justice. Thus, in an article he
wrote for Outlook in 1981 commemorating the 38th anniversary of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising, he did not limit himself to urging the prosecution of
Nazi
war criminals and support for Holocaust education in the universities.
He
also called on progressive Jews to resist right-wing Christian
fundamentalism, oppose U.S. intervention against popular forces in El
Salvador and to confront the threat of nuclear war. "This immortal legacy,"
he wrote of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, "challenges the living to 'light
our road' for peace, freedom and a renewed fight against anti-Semitism
and
all forms of racism."